Soon he’d taught himself the basics and was playing in school bands and on the city’s club circuit. At 15 he persuaded his father to buy him his first guitar, a £50 copy of Marvin’s red Stratocaster. He traced the arc of Marvin’s distinctive sound back to American wizards like Chet Atkins, Elvis’s guitar slingers Scotty Moore and James Burton, and blues greats such as Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Howlin’ Wolf. Hearing the latter, and in particular their bespectacled lead guitarist Hank Marvin, opened up a future filled with possibilities for Mark Knopfler. The brothers latched on to Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and, later, The Shadows. Music was a fact of life in the Knopfler house. When the family moved to Newcastle in the 50s their English mother became a headmistress, and both boys attended a local grammar school in Gosforth.
Their father was an architect expelled from his native Hungary on account of his firebrand socialism. His brother and future Dire Straits bandmate David followed three years later. Mark Knopfler was born into a middle-class household in Glasgow in 1949. Dire Straits became a byword for a certain sort of safe, homogenised music, and Knopfler was turned into a caricature of the middle-aged rocker, with jacket sleeves rolled up and wearing a headband.
It made Dire Straits superstars, but it also warped the popular perception of both Knopfler and his band. That record was unstoppable from the moment of its release in May 1985. Theirs was no fleeting moment, either, with three more hit records following before they reached their apogee on their fifth studio album, Brothers In Arms. The white-hot success of their first single, Sultans Of Swing, and self-titled debut album was founded on the elder Knopfler’s fluid, finger-picked guitar style, which sounded as lovely as a bubbling stream. Emerging from the city’s fertile pub-rock scene at the dawn of the punk era, they were an overnight sensation. The simple facts are these: Knopfler formed Dire Straits in London in 1977 with his younger brother David on rhythm guitar, John Illsley on bass and Pick Withers on drums.
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